Beyond 1776: Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution

By Denys Van Renen, Edward N. Simon, Leonard Von Morze and 6 more

In Beyond 1776, ten humanities scholars consider the American Revolution within a global framework. The foundation of the United States was deeply enmeshed with shifting alliances and multiple actors, with politics saturated by imaginative literature, and with ostensible bilateral negotiations that were, in fact, shaped by speculation about realignments in geopolitical power. To reanimate these intricate and often indirect connections, this volume uncovers the influences of people across disparate sites both during and after independence.

The book centers first on the migration of ideas across the Atlantic, particularly among intellectuals and through print. In this section, scholars focus on how various European countries or cliques appropriate the Revolution to reanimate an array of national, local, or cosmopolitan affiliations. The essays in the second section articulate how revolutions fostered surprising exchanges in, for example the West Indies and in the first penal colonies of Australia, along the Celtic fringe and Pacific Rim, and in the vast territories through which goods circulated. Taken as a whole, this collection answers the persistent calls from scholars to move beyond the boundaries defined by the nation-state or periodization to rethink narratives of U.S. foundations. The contributors examine a range of texts, from novels and drama to diplomatic correspondence, letters of common sailors, political treatises, newspapers, accounting ledgers, naval records, and burial rituals (many from non-Anglophone sources).

Beyond 1776 will appeal to scholars seeking to understand contact and exchange in the late eighteenth century. It indexes how different intellectuals in the period deployed the Revolution as a point of connection; follows the dispersal of print books, guns, slaves, and memorabilia; and evaluates literary responses to the new republic. The book puts in conversation scholars of literature, theater, history, modern languages, American studies, political science, transatlanticism, cultural studies, women’s studies, postcolonialism, and geography.

Contributors: Jeng-Guo Chen, Academia Sinica, Taiwan * Matthew Dziennik, United States Naval Academy * Miranda Green-Barteet, University of Western Ontario * Carine Lounissi, Université de Rouen-Normandie * Therese-Marie Meyer, Martin-Luther-University of Halle- Wittenberg * Maria O’Malley, University of Nebraska, Kearney * Denys Van Renen, University of Nebraska, Kearney * Ed Simon, Bentley University * Wyger Velema, University of Amsterdam * Leonard von Morzé, University of Massachusetts, Boston

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Dec 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813941769

Book preview

Beyond 1776

Beyond 1776

Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution

Edited by

Maria O’Malley and Denys Van Renen

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Kearney.

University of Virginia Press

© 2018 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2018

ISBN 978-0-8139-4175-2 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4176-9 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Cover art: British naval assault on Saint Eustatius, hand-colored etching, 1780–90, Augsbourg (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-pga-04399) (top); The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar, John Trumbull, 1789 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accession no. 1976.332) (bottom)

To our parents

Betty and John

Ellen and Denys

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I

Transatlantic Cliques

Circulating the American Revolution: The Atlantic Networks of Christian Jacob Hütter

Leonard von Morzé

Republicanism Redefined: How the American Revolution Transformed Dutch Political Culture

Wyger R. E. Velema

French Writers on the American Revolution in the Early 1780s: A Republican Moment?

Carine Lounissi

Political Theology and the Alternate Enlightenment: From the War of the Three Kingdoms to the American Revolution

Ed Simon

Charlotte Corday’s Gendered Terror: Femininity, Violence, and Domestic Peace in Sarah Pogson’s The Female Enthusiast

Miranda A. Green-Barteet

Part II

Secret Histories and Revolutionary Afterlives

Soldiers, Politics, and the American Revolution in Ireland and Scotland

Matthew P. Dziennik

Franklin’s Mail: Gun Trafficking and the Elisions of History

Maria O’Malley

Stuck a Bayonet into the Grave & Renew’d Their Oath: The American Revolution and the First Fleet

Therese-Marie Meyer

The Tea Not Consumed: Cultural and Political Meanings of the American Revolution in China, 1774–1912

Jeng-Guo Chen

Walk upon Water: Equiano and the Globalizing Subject

Denys Van Renen

Notes on Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

We are pleased to acknowledge the support of institutions, societies, and scholars in helping us put together a collection with such an expansive scope. Our greatest debt is to the Department of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), which offered a very generous grant in support of the research and production of the book. In particular, our department chair, Samuel Umland, has been an advocate for the project since its first germination and offered a ready ear to us as it unfolded. Also at UNK, Dean Bill Jurma and Dean Kenya Taylor provided research and travel funds to complete the manuscript. In particular, the Research Services Council at UNK awarded a grant to conduct research at the Library of Congress and course releases from teaching to finish the book. We thank the American Democracy Project, at UNK, for its help in promoting the book.

This collection began as a panel at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 2014. In its later stages, the Society of Early Americanists invited us to hold a roundtable at the American Literature Association conference in San Francisco in 2016. We thank these professional organizations for their work in promoting scholarship on the eighteenth century.

Many individuals helped us along the way, since the volume required expertise in multiple disciplines, especially Edward Larkin, Robert Markley, Leonard von Morzé, and Monique Allewaert. We owe much to the two anonymous readers who carefully read the collection in its entirety and offered constructive feedback.

Our experience working with the University of Virginia Press has been a high point of the process. We offer hearty thanks to Angie Hogan, our editor, for her thoroughness, professionalism, and enthusiasm throughout the review and editing process. We also gratefully acknowledge Susan Murray for her careful copyediting of the manuscript.

Many thanks to each of the contributors, whose fastidious research and good humor made the long publication process a worthwhile one. We are grateful not only for the original scholarship featured in their essays but also for the original translations they provided of source material otherwise unavailable in English.

Lastly, we thank each other for creating a fruitful partnership in coediting the collection, which we put forth as evidence of the creative potential of traversing the disciplinary boundaries of American and British literature.

Introduction

Sovereignty was granted to the United States neither through the Declaration of Independence nor through the military victories that led Great Britain to end the Revolutionary War but rather through France’s willingness to enter a peace treaty with the States in 1778. If the alliance with France established the thirteen colonies as treaty worthy, then it was the Treaty of Paris, in which Britain relinquished its claims to the colonies in 1783, that established the United States as an empire. The coup for the United States was not merely an end to armed conflict and Britain’s recognition of it as an independent country but rather the substantial concessions it wrangled out of King George III as a result of exploiting the ongoing antagonisms among France, Spain, Great Britain, and the United Provinces. Indeed, the French ministers were surprised to see how the peace terms favored the United States.¹ Ironically, even though the bilateral agreement with France cemented the United States as treaty worthy in the first place, in negotiating a separate peace with English diplomats without French counsel, and thus securing Britain’s acknowledgment of U.S. independence, the American plenipotentiaries violated the terms of its pact with France. Despite overtures of transparency to France during the fallout, the American peace commissioners in fact withheld the secret terms between the United States and the British that involved fishing rights, because they impinged on France’s claim to waters off the Canadian coast. When Benjamin Franklin was tasked with repairing the diplomatic slight against America’s chief creditor, he wrote a letter to his French counterpart, Comte de Vergennes, to mollify him as well as to suggest that, despite the U.S. faux pas, the two countries should continue to share the confidence of intimates: I hope this little misunderstanding will therefore be kept a secret.²

The foundation of the United States proves to be deeply enmeshed with shifting alliances and multiple actors; with politics saturated by imaginative literature; and with ostensible bilateral negotiations that were, in fact, shaped by speculation about realignments in international power. The history we reconstruct enlists a range of disciplinary expertise of scholars across eighteenth-century studies, pointing as it does to the imperial networks that, as Edward Larkin observes, served as the impetus and framework for the formation of the United States.³ The United States’ secret with England over the fishing rights seems, paradoxically, to intensify its intimacy with France, underscoring how American foreign relations exploit and stretch imperial epistemes. Certainly, Franklin and Vergennes’s relations involve their shared cosmopolitan values, and, as Larkin underlines, imperialism and cosmopolitan thought intersect: The tumultuous period that witnessed the birth of the nation-state was the cradle of modern cosmopolitan.⁴ More broadly, as Ross Posnock emphasizes, cosmopolitan attitudes interrogate and unsettle conventional notions of boundary, limit, and identity.⁵ In drawing attention to the relationships that bolster or compete with America’s overt wartime and diplomatic transactions, this volume seeks to examine the dialectic between (imagined or otherwise) local or interpersonal affiliations and wider (geopolitical) developments, namely the American Revolution.

The problem with any sustained study of the undercurrents of the nascent United States is a practical dilemma: the limits of one scholar’s expertise. An edited collection addressing this particular subject overcomes this impediment by putting scholars working on different cultures and in different disciplines in conversation to reanimate these networks of contact. These contributors survey a range of texts beyond Anglophone sources: novels, drama, diplomatic correspondence, letters of common sailors, political treatises, newspapers, accounting ledgers, naval records, and burial rituals using close textual analysis. Moreover, this volume provides a broader context for the war, its peace process, and the implications of the new borders and settlements that arose in its wake. The American Revolution, though, still serves as a focal point, not because it epitomized or served as the template for other eighteenth-century phenomena or events; nor do we suggest the entire world paused as the conflict unfolded. In fact, some of the subjects of this volume, like many of their contemporaries, barely noticed it. Some contributors directly invoke the American Revolution; others, though, concentrate on events that merely skirt, coincide, or indirectly relate to the conflict. Rather we chose the American Revolution because it—surprisingly—is understudied in that scholarship imposes arbitrary boundaries on it. As Larkin notes, the story of the Revolution seems to interrupt the chronology of the rise of the United States as an imperial power: some scholars identify its roots in the colonies’ entanglement with the British Empire in the eighteenth century (the Anglicization thesis), while others identify the United States emerging as a nascent empire in the nineteenth century.⁶ These two schools of thought cannot be reconciled, as Larkin explains, because both Anglicization and postnationalist American studies cast the Revolution as a national moment.⁷ Memorializing about the Revolution has been central to constructions of the United States as a reluctant geopolitical force.

The scholars collected here follow the lead of the historian Eliga Gould, who argues for looking at the nation’s founding from what we might call the ‘outside in’ perspective of the Union’s relations with other nations.⁸ Gould’s spatial formulation undergirds all the essays as they seek to illuminate often ignored actors that re-present, appropriate, or influence the permutations of American Independence. The premise that it would be more accurate to say that the revolution enabled Americans to make the history that other people were prepared to let them make may overstate colonists’ passivity to world events.⁹ But Gould’s intervention reiterates how different governmental or commercial entities and individuals plying circum-Atlantic routes shaped the United States, integrated with others to create new entities, or simply disappeared. That is, as Jack Greene explains, people were responsible for carrying out the imperatives of the fiscal-military state, and these enterprises developed cultural hearths or specific interpretations of the directives of corporate or state entities that then resulted in the creation of new policies with their own peculiar identities in other realms.¹⁰

In broaching the Revolution from this perspective, we accomplish two goals: one, we further elucidate interdependencies among global players, especially in terms of trade, finance, and military aggression, that took root in the eighteenth century; and two, we overcome some of the intractability of the stories of U.S. nationhood. After all, as Greene writes, how can anyone resist an opportunity to subvert the parochial mentality implicit in the national state focus?¹¹ As a narrowly defined signifier, the American Revolution both enabled others to define themselves in relation to it (and thus reject their peripheral status) and erased other lines of influence that might have stretched the Revolution’s borders. And yet disciplinary configurations in the humanities, along national lines, contribute to these others’ subordination. As Sandra Gustafson explains: Scholars of the colonial period and the early republic are moving quickly to develop new histories that are less bound to the nation as a framework of knowledge production, and these histories have much to offer to scholars working in later periods. They provide a useful corrective to anti-imperialist and postnationalist critiques, which can reify the nation by focusing on its formation, consequences, and inadequacies.¹² The scholars collected here trace the global dimensions that undergirded the very founding of the United States, especially the power relations that not only were fluid but also included a range of surprising actors that widen the discipline of the American Revolution.

Why the American Revolution? Why Global?

The acquiescence of the French and even the Spanish to relinquish their negotiating power in 1784, including Spain’s long-sought objective to reclaim Gibraltar from the English Crown, and to sign the peace settlement largely negotiated by the Americans and English peace delegations, may have derived from their wish to see a return on their substantial loans to the United States. But their acquiescence also lay in their assessment of more pressing matters involved in ongoing Old World conflicts. According to a biography of Vergennes, the French foreign minister responsible for negotiating with the Americans, France did not stymie the peace settlement despite the American breach of conduct because France had to turn its attention to the Russian invasion of Crimea in April 1783.¹³ France could hardly protest the favorable terms between Great Britain and the United States, even if it undercut France’s stake in North America, because Vergennes was worried that Russia’s annexation of Crimea might alter the power dynamics among France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empires. The Americans’ diplomatic coup highlights the precarious and shifting relationships among the European and Asian powers. More importantly, it places American popular sovereignty within a broader international framework characterized by intricate and, at times, indirect connections across the world in the late eighteenth century. Networks (of people, ideas, print, commodities, and money), we argue, registered, contained, or appropriated the energies of the American Revolution. Tracing the large-scale political developments that led to the formation of the United States in the late eighteenth century, we can better sift through the subtle gradations of exchanges across cultures.

Rather than invoke the national, as in postnational or international, we emphasize the forgotten sites and local appropriations of American Independence. In particular, our emphasis lies in the ways in which U.S. self-sovereignty operates as one node that produces centrifugal forces that register with peoples across the globe because they, too, have thought through the sometimes parallel and sometimes contradictory vectors of local, national, and imperial agendas. Scholars who conceptualize the mutually constitutive processes that emerge through contact between disparate peoples put forth different metaphorical constructions to characterize these convergences. Many scholars refer to systems, usually by adapting Immanuel Wallerstein’s theories about the emergence of the capitalist World Systems in the early modern period, which chart the flow of capital to determine how some rise and others lose economic or social standing. The concept of world systems has proven useful for describing disproportionate wealth and articulating transnational or circulatory flows.¹⁴ Other scholars use the term network to broaden the categories of connections beyond the movements of capital to include cultural transmissions and to highlight the circuitous routes of exchange rather than simply transnational ones. The use of networks to chart relationships emphasizes how influence is not just unidirectional; the periphery can transform the center. Both world systems and networks concretize instances of contact and exchange, but at times, they naturalize transnational links once they are set in motion by the investment of capital or a technological innovation. These two models, in other words, do not always account for the ways in which power is established or maintained in network or system topologies because they subordinate seemingly insignificant challenges to or appropriations of capital or information. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for example, underline how the powerless enact and embody the spread of information through their global migrations, including the production of ideas, images, knowledges, communication, cooperation, and affective relations.¹⁵ The essays herein track the influence of actants, any entity or object that produces an effect in the world.¹⁶

The beginnings of U.S. nationhood accrue a multiplicity of meanings because of the global influences on it. At different times a different United States materializes, and these multiple iterations almost lead to incoherence; but reconstructing the actors involved in the formation of the United States as well as studying how similar impulses appear elsewhere enable us to disentangle at least the preconceptions or overarching narratives that distract from other significant cross currents. As eighteenth-century Americanist scholars uncover the assemblages of peoples and ideas from New England and Virginia to the black Atlantic to the transatlantic to the hemispheric to the transoceanic, their studies continue to broaden Anglo-American accounts of the period 1776–84. In the past couple of decades, research has intensified, foregrounding geographic configurations that destabilize strict disciplinary boundaries demarcated by period and nation: Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach on the transatlantic; Ralph Bauer and Caroline Levander on the hemispheric; Michelle Burnham on the oceanic; and Paul Giles on the antipodean Americas.

The Revolution was a memorable example—one of many—that reinforces the ways in which late eighteenth-century upheavals dissolve and reform as different condensations of ideas and peoples. As Lawrence Buell concedes, many of these studies offer particularly arresting testimony as to the impossibility of prying ‘hemispheric,’ ‘Atlantic,’ and ‘transpacific’ fields apart from one another.¹⁷ Efforts to limit cultural transmission and to reiterate regional or hemispheric boundaries threaten to substitute one historical totality for another (the lore of the American Revolution). Even though the varieties of eighteenth-century life can be somewhat dizzying, it behooves us to uncover some of the microsites and movements that animate the period and serve as cross-sections of global exchanges at a time of rapid change.

One way scholars have moved past fixing the United States as a nation-state is by attending to another key feature of the late eighteenth-century world: cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, the era’s cosmopolitanism grasps the heterogeneity of the people that the United States sought to absorb; on the other, it provides a (sometimes negative) ontology for U.S. modalities. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, for example, argue that Barbary captivity narratives offered the new United States a way to imagine a community in cosmopolitan terms.¹⁸ Thus, the nation must presuppose a subject who understands his very being, as Barbary captives do, as contingent on a group that interacts, combines, and recombines with other groups in a dynamic flow.¹⁹ The captivity narrative both represents a contingent subject and draws from accounts of forced imprisonment in plays, autobiographies, travelogues, Afro-British literature, and novels that depict the Middle East, the Americas, and Africa, among other sites.

Perspectives that eschew the nation-state model also have led to a reexamination of political Loyalists, a surprisingly neglected group. Philip Gould surmises that the Loyalists’ presence changes the ways in which we read the political literature of this period and produces a new image of the complex political and cultural dynamics shaping British Americans’ renegotiations of their fraught and damaged relation to ‘English’ culture.²⁰ Leonard Tennenhouse argues that the colonial settlers constituted a diaspora, an idea echoed by Maya Jasonoff. Elisa Tamarkin, too, has sought to understand the lingering sentiment of Anglophilia in the colony long after British rule ceased.²¹ It seems this scholarly neglect results from how Great Britain did nothing to incorporate or identify with Loyalists during the war, nor did they figure in American accounts of the early republic.

Wil Verhoeven suggests yet another word to describe the nascent United States: postnationalist. Verhoeven hedges, though, by offering the term internationalists—an economic order that is based on international division of labor, which determines relationships between different regions as well as the types of labor conditions within each region.²² Yet postnationalist may be the most accurate rendering as it reanimates the tired construction of international at the same time it recalls a joke about Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), which describes it as a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. The United States, as allegedly illustrative of the nation-state, delegitimizes other forms of belonging even as it, upon closer examination, proves to benefit from these same fiercely local affiliations and increasingly far-flung interconnections. It is the post that registers so much scholarly anxiety because we have not fully articulated how late eighteenth-century forms provide the ur-texts for the modern condition.

To move past the metonymic associations of 1776 to capture more nuanced dimensions of the late eighteenth century, the essays that follow analyze the dynamic processes involved in material transactions, negotiation, colonizing, and narrativizing that occur throughout the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century world. These processes were and are central to U.S. nation building but are not exclusively defined or controlled by Western states. In entering a long-established debate about how to reconcile the discourse of insularity in the United States with its role as a formidable empire and as prominent player in foreign affairs, the volume as a whole notes the influences of peoples across disparate sites both during and after independence.

Placing the American Revolution in a broader context by drawing upon new disciplinary configurations introduced by American studies, we illuminate both the local communities and (trans)hemispheric relationships (that were sometimes imagined as intimate) that formed alongside, in opposition to, or coextensively with the American Revolution. Although we, like others, acknowledge the dissolution of indigenous communities in the name of empire, we also attend to their reemergence through the very methods that threatened their demise. Efforts to decenter not only the United States but also its revolution have been at the heart of American studies for the last two decades. The essays that follow return our gaze to the Revolution only to put it alongside concurrent events that sometimes were energized or influenced by and, at other times, were confirmed in their opposition to some of the United States’ constituent elements. The Peace of Paris makes explicit the global transmissions involved in the establishment of the United States as a sovereign state, because different parts of the world were traded among the signers, such as Britain giving Minorca to Spain, the Senegal River to France, and Trincomalee in Sri Lanka to the Dutch Republic. Indeed, a week after signing the Treaty of Paris to finalize the peace settlement, the American peace delegation—Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay—wrote to U.S. authorities about the urgency of sending a diplomat to Morocco. The United States no longer could enjoy protection on international waters through Britain’s treaties with the Barbary States. They explain, Our Trade to the Mediterranean will not be inconsiderable, and the Friendship of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis & Tripoli, may become very interesting, in case the Russians should succeed in their Endeavours to Navigate freely into it by Constantinople.²³ The statement’s use of litotes, not inconsiderable, and its vagueness, very interesting, illustrate how the formation of the United States was contingent on the moves of stakeholders in other regions and countries over which it had no control or negotiating power. As these relationships were fluid, the encrusted narratives that shape historical and literary scholarship not only diminish U.S. involvement far beyond the shores of the Atlantic but also neglect to underscore how U.S. policy was by no means unidirectional; in this case, Russia—through the Ottoman Empire—dictated U.S. foreign policy. That is, only by studying other countries’ governmental aims can we understand the early republic.

The outside-in perspective, then, reveals the networks of peoples and the seemingly insignificant places that figured substantially in the political and economic fortunes of numerous countries. For example, the Dutch West-Indian colony of St. Eustatius—the purloined letter of the late eighteenth century—appeared everywhere and nowhere as the nexus for contraband, and its importance can be attested by its fate: it was burned to the ground in the final months of the Revolution seemingly as part of a renewed conflict between the British and the Dutch. Britain destroyed the country to stave off weapon smuggling to the colonies, which had relied on ships routed through the island to overcome the British naval blockade; but the severity of its destruction may be explained by yet another factor: the anti-Semitism directed at the island’s sizable Jewish population. Yet this aim to destroy commercial routes and decimate one ethnic group caused various communities to scatter across the globe, including the untraceable movements of those who labored as slaves. Also the devastating losses the United Provinces incurred in the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War led to the reevaluation of republicanism in the Dutch Republic, which deepened after the U.S. Constitutional Convention.

Similarly, the pressing needs of the British armed forces brought an eclectic mix of people to fight in the war, and, after its defeat, the British government sent those troops across the world to assorted outposts.²⁴ General Charles Cornwallis, for example, after his surrender at Yorktown was sent to Calcutta and named governor-general of India.²⁵ The unprecedented losses in the British officer corps also led to problems when poorly trained commissioned officers were sent to settle parts of Australia. These examples clarify the ways in which the Revolution was one node of a global network, a network that repeatedly recalibrates. Indeed, every essay accounts for how the global stakes often transformed substantially just in the course of a few years.

By using a global framework, we reconstruct the circulation of people, goods, and ideas that have been impeded by the usual metonymic associations of American Independence—George Washington, Bunker Hill, republicanism.²⁶ While transatlanticism has proven useful to reveal Anglo-American shared enterprises before and after the United States became a sovereign nation, transactions between New England and Britain dominate the discussion. Broadening (or perhaps employing a more accurate form of) transatlanticism, the collection studies representations of German, French, Irish, Scottish, and Dutch movements; we also consider Australia, the Far East, the Arctic, and the Mediterranean. By prioritizing traffic across the hemisphere and far-flung sites, this volume observes the pressures exerted by other actors on the United States as well as the ongoing formations of different entities that experienced similar influences. Thus, this collection looks at how different intellectuals in the period used the Revolution as a point of connection; it follows the dispersal of print books, guns, slaves, and even revolutionary memorabilia sold in China; it evaluates literary responses to the new republic; it establishes links between the American Revolution and the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century; it also examines ritual practices that started in the colonies and then spread throughout British holdings, and even how, as Matthew P. Dziennik explains, Scottish and Irish peoples seized on the war to meet local needs.²⁷

Yet besides the acknowledgment of France’s generous patronage and lingering fascination with the role of Hessian soldiers in the war, the U.S. story remains one that barely gestures beyond certain internal colonial spots. As Michelle Burnham remarks, the year 1776 exerts an almost gravitational pull in dominant narratives of American history and literature, often yanking efforts at alternative narratives and perspectives back into more familiar temporal and spatial terms the closer one gets to the revolutionary moment.²⁸ More broadly, Amy Kaplan challenge[s] the way the history of US imperialism has often revolved around a central geographic bifurcation between continental expansion and overseas empire.²⁹ We acknowledge this gravitational pull as indexing other global movements in the sense that the American Revolution was enmeshed with other historical and social movements. To move beyond dominant narratives of American history and literature means examining the developments concurrent with it.

Several recent studies have demonstrated the multifaceted dynamics of the Haitian Revolution, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American War of 1898. This volume follows the lead of these scholars as well as spotlights other seemingly insignificant revolutions or forgotten elements of them. It builds upon the work of historians and literary scholars, like Eliga Gould, Leonard Tennenhouse, Maya Jasonoff, and Philip Gould, who reevaluate the internal power dynamics involved in the complex geographies of the Crisis. Recent scholarship, moreover, seeks to clarify the tensions within U.S. empire building. Andy Doolen memorably explains, There is a distinctive impression that imperialism is truly a rupture in the American experience, ephemeral, and violent, but causing only a temporary suspension of republican enlightenment and order.³⁰ Scholars, therefore, must be attuned to the paradoxes that emerge when tackling the question of American imperialism. Indeed, Hardt and Negri argue that the U.S. Constitution is built upon a principle of expansion [that] continually struggles against the forces of limitation and control.³¹ Perhaps Kaplan clarifies the point most succinctly: Imperialism does not emanate from the solid center of a fully formed nation; rather, the meaning of the nation itself is both questioned and redefined through the outward reach of empire.³² The essays collected in this volume together make a strong case that empire actually precedes the formation of the nation-state. Our treatment of global dimensions notes the unequal distribution of power. But because military hegemony was limited and people expressed many different forms of economic agency, we demonstrate how underdiscussed registers—such as topographic knowledge, cultural literacy and adaptability, and religious authority—introduce new frameworks for characterizing these exchanges. Americans cling to the national moment as a refuge, a comforting illusion, during times of change rather than apprehend—even as they participate in—the dependencies that cement its federation of states.

The writings of Olaudah Equiano make the point more concrete because he, like the American Revolution, can sometimes be subsumed by shorthands. His autobiography, one of the new classics of early American literary study,³³ serves as a representative example for scholars because even as they highlight the contributions of marginalized peoples, they sometimes link him with traditional narratives of establishing individual identity, shrinking, in effect, his travels to fit the (Western) sphere that interests us. He, moreover, maps well onto this changing narrative of the revolutionary period: he is subject to British imperial ambitions, and he identifies with heterogeneous local, national, and global assemblages, attaching to whatever group or idea that promises liberation from existing sociocultural forms. As Marlon B. Ross points out, Equiano’s autobiography, which chronicles his birth in Africa, his enslavement, his forced removal across the Middle Passage, his servitude in the United States and Europe and his eventual manumission, evidences the limitations of subdisciplinary boundaries in English literary studies.³⁴ He, for instance, appears in surveys of both British and American literatures and in courses on transatlanticism and African American literature.³⁵ Upending the placement of Equiano in discrete disciplines, Peter Jaros notes his use of the conjunction or between his two names: The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa; Equiano, he writes, manifests the logic of plural identity.³⁶ Moreover, Vincent Carretta has offered evidence that Equiano may never have experienced the Middle Passage but was perhaps born in in South Carolina, not Africa.³⁷ Equiano, in short, continues to demand fresh interpretations long after his story was published or canonized. This versatility extends to his discursive iterations of his life. In his life writing, Equiano absorbs each encounter with people, environments, or experiences into a new and more complex self; he eventually proves, for us, a figure who exhibits traces from diverse geographies and cultures. His facility, in fact, with eighteenth-century discourses—Gothic and sentimental literature, Crusoean adventure stories, aspirational or spiritual tales or biographies, and Afro-British literature—reiterates that he experiments with different overarching narratives, but these do not necessarily explain or substitute for his unique ontology, a life that proves just as compelling as the genres he inherits and transforms. The United States uses its Revolution, or its constructions of it, to shape its imperial designs or distract from them. Both the United States and Equiano operate in a state of constant apotheosis, evoking as it were the famous line from Milton’s Paradise Lost: we know no time when we were not as now. Each incident both rewrites the self and conceals its originary mechanisms in the process. Nevertheless, like the entity early America, loose frameworks of eighteenth-century assemblages can be represented without severing them from their context within a rapidly changing world.

Essays

The contributors attest to the largely unrecognized affiliations among diverse groups as more people migrated to different parts of the world but continued to transact with others back home, communicate in multiple languages, adapt to new imported products, and respond to local and international events. The focus on the American Revolution is neither special nor distinct; however, it provides a departure point, allowing us to engage with particularly vexed questions of historical teleology. As Robert Markley observes with regard to the plays of Aphra Behn, her work was neglected for so long because she is historically on the losing side; she dramatizes culturally specific forms of resistance . . . at the expense of Whiggish conceptions of individual rights.³⁸ The losing side, however, perhaps appears more prominently than scholars have heretofore addressed. Restoring what was pared away to form a cohesive and continuous narrative is one of the main objectives of these essays. In the following essays, we aim to counter deliberately the, at times, teleological thinking about the revolutionary era.

The essays have been divided into two parts. Part 1, Transatlantic Cliques, centers on the migration of ideas across cultures in Great Britain and the